Memory trundles across her face, rippling
beneath her eyes like a loose thread pulled,
pleating the fabric skin behind it, on the rare
occasion a nest call hums in the background
of a series maman watched as a child:
it was the musa, ku taghi? bird, she’d explain
when she found an episode online,
a feathered time machine whose call,
even a single note, would catapult her
into the creased wings of the grandmother
who loved her most desperately, and for this,
remembrance by way of a bird named for an inquiry
was a pursuit of agony, a bird native to nowhere
near here, to think that the distance between
life and death is one breath, but the entire atlās
undulates between house and homeland,
and I too hold this legacy of nostalgia
as a tenderness never resurrected: lore tells us
karim begged to be turned into a bird
when taghi goes missing—eternally in the skies,
he pleads with the third brother mournfully:
musa, where is taghi? Then, some years later,
I was stunned to learn, it is called a laughing dove,
its song described as pleasant, bubbly, melodic,
but on a spring trip to Isfahan, the screen door
to the backyard ajar, I finally heard the rolling
croo-coo-coo-coo-coo, and my aunt, mid-sentence,
reached for her heart, there it was again, a face
collapsing in reminiscence before she said quietly
and to no one: do you know who this reminds me of?
they had no photographs with her, no recordings
of their grandmother’s voice, I step into the yard,
on the ledge of the brick wall, a long tail, pinkish
brown underside, lilac head, crooning, I notice
its beak never opens, how can it be, this call
summoning his kin, resounds in the throat,
pulsating in a copper-tipped chest, trapped
